Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T14:22:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Reinaldo Augusto de Oliveira Ramos.pdf: 2077084 bytes, checksum: 37060ab0d0c88fe2c2aa4098bf809ea7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-04-08 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / This paper introduces the possibilities of using informatized interactive systems in effectively teaching computer logics and the development of logic thinking and its implications. It is about experiment and analysis accomplished in educational institutions in the city of São Paulo, having the directive to observate the given hypothesis: games and their developing tools can work as methodological resources to the teaching-learning process in the development of the conception of logic programming as used with intentionality. To progress in educating students on logic programming and in mathematical abstraction, it is proposed the development of electronic games through singular tools level editors, simplified scripts and visual programming environments. These help develop propositions, digital productions, animations, sounds and other interactive resources with the objective of working and problematizing in practical environments and of arranging facts and simulated experiments to understand logics. Using development indicators in the evolution processes of students, individual cases were studied, in which it was observed the way the teaching-learning process works, from propositions faced during the game production. Through the discussion, it was analysed the importance of different kinds of tools used to teach and learn the programming logic contents. Therefore, this study is based on theoretical references provided by Jean Piaget s constructivism Lev Semenovitch Vygostky s social-historical approach and Seymour Papert s and José Armando Valente s constructionism. We seek in these methodologies, in special Vygotsky s Proximal Development Zone theory, the key to the pedagogic base of the methodology here proposed. Coming to the conclusion, this present work confirms the hypothesis that games and their development tools can be na adequate instrument for studentes to understand programming logics. It also has a bibliographic revision on interactive media, culture and also education and information science / Este trabalho apresenta as possibilidades de uso de sistemas informatizados interativos para o aproveitamento no ensino da lógica computacional e na construção do raciocínio lógico e suas implicações. Trata-se de experimentos e análises realizadas em instituições de ensino da cidade de São Paulo e experiências em sala de aula com o objetivo de verificar a hipótese de que o jogo e suas ferramentas de desenvolvimento são recursos metodológicos de ensino e aprendizagem para a construção da noção de lógica de programação, ao ser utilizado com intencionalidade. Para desenvolver o ensino de lógica de programação propõe-se o desenvolvimento de jogos eletrônicos através de ferramentas especializadas - editores de fase, scripts simplificados e ambientes de programação visual. Elas auxiliam a resolver problemas, desenvolver produções digitais, animações, sons e demais recursos interativos que objetivam problematizar sobre o aprendizado de lógica e de abstração matemática em ambientes práticos, com experiências de simulação e o entendimento de conceitos para a elaboração do raciocínio lógico. Com base em indicadores de evolução dos processos de desenvolvimento dos alunos estudaram-se casos nos quais se observou o desenrolar do processo de ensino e da aprendizagem a partir dos problemas enfrentados durante a produção dos jogos. Nesta reflexão, analisou-se a importância dos tipos de ferramentas utilizadas para o ensino e a aprendizagem dos conteúdos propostos em lógica de programação. Para tanto, as nossas referências teóricas foram o construtivismo de Jean Piaget, a abordagem sócio-histórica de Lev Semenovitch Vygotsky e o construcionismo de Seymour Papert e de José Armando Valente. Buscamos nestas metodologias e, em especial na teoria da Zona de Desenvolvimento Proximal de Vygotsky a chave para a fundamentação pedagógica de nossa reflexão. Em conclusão, o presente trabalho corrobora a hipótese de que os jogos e suas ferramentas de desenvolvimento podem servir de instrumento para a compreensão de lógica de programação. Este trabalho conta com uma revisão bibliográfica sobre mídias interativas, sua cultura e também educação e informática

當前組織可謂處在一個「變動的年代」，大至政府，小到企業，絕大多數組織無不戮力實踐各種形式的變革運動，然而，根據近來統計數字顯示，多數的變革並未能達成其預期目標，深究其因，主要乃在於組織缺乏具備認識變遷及其層面的心智模式，也就是本文所謂的變遷邏輯（Logics of change）。 變遷邏輯係指組織對變遷議題所持的深層基本假定，它提供一種認知圖象（Cognitive map），持續地引導組織有意識或無意識地依循著本身的假定，解釋與認知浮現於組織內外的種種情境與現象，作出變遷過程中的各項抉擇。然而，變遷邏輯常被組織視為理所當然而未予重新檢視，此種對於變遷根本性問題的忽視，往往造成組織處理變遷問題的盲點或是箝制了組織的未來發展性。因此，本文藉由探討與檢閱相關研究，對變遷邏輯理論作系統性的歸納，凸顯吾人應以反思批判的態度來面對組織的變遷。 相對於現有之變遷邏輯相關論述，作為一部中國自古流傳至今的「變經」（The Book of Changes）——《易經》，其所提供吾人的變遷世界觀，對於身處日新月異環境中的組織而言，深具開放而不落伍的啟示價值。本文藉由援引《易經》「長於變」的思想精華，與「變遷邏輯」理論相互印證與結合，試圖建構出可為之依循的常道，提供組織一個以簡御繁的全觀性架構，來面對組織的實質變遷問題。是以，本文嘗試從剖析《易經》哲學四項變化律則作為起始，結合列舉的變遷邏輯理論類型，建構出「辯證與陰陽」、「線性與循環」、個體與整體」、「混沌與和諧」等四種層面的討論，驅使吾人重新以「陰陽變化」、「循環變化」、「整體變化」、「和諧變化」的思考角度去看待組織的變遷世界。 目 次 第一章 緒論……………………………………………1 第一節 研究動機與目的…………………………………………2 第二節 研究範圍、方法與限制…………………………………6 第三節 研究架構與流程…………………………………………9 第二章 變遷邏輯概念分析…………………………15 第一節 變遷邏輯的背景系絡…………………………………15 第二節 變遷邏輯的意涵………………………………………18 第三節 變遷邏輯的重要性……………………………………22 第四節 變遷邏輯的理論類型…………………………………27 第三章 易經哲學與變遷…………………………….47 第一節 易經哲學體系概觀……………………………………47 第二節 易經哲學與變遷議題的關聯性………………………55 第三節 易經「變」的思想特質…………………………………61 第四章 易經觀點的組織變遷邏輯………………….73 第一節 辯證與陰陽變遷邏輯…………………………………73 第二節 線性與循環變遷邏輯…………………………………83 第三節 個體與整體變遷邏輯…………………………………95 第四節 混沌與和諧變遷邏輯………………………………105 第五章 結論…………………………………………119 第一節 研究回顧：變與常的矛盾與整合……………………120 第二節 未來展望：順天應人的變遷哲學……………………124

This thesis is a case study of the Swedish Rehabilitation Reform of 1992. Vocational rehabilitation is described as an organizational activity which takes place in the interaction between social policy regulations and organizational execution. The analytical point of departure is made up of two complementary theoretical perspectives (Chapter 3): New institutional theory and the concept of 'negotiated order'. New institutional theory can aid inter-organizational analysis as it assumes that organizations are not only influenced, but also permeated by institutional and technical frameworks. The 'negotiated order' perspective can provide an understanding of actors' motives when they work together. This perspective also acknowledges that actors are able to exercise 'episodic power', and that this differs from 'formal power'. The first empirical study (Chapter 4) analyses the political motives behind the Rehabilitation Reform of 1992. It shows that at the time of the Rehabilitation Reform economical and political interests were pushing for a tighter regulations in Swedish social policy. The following three empirical studies focus on the 'organizational field' in which rehabilitation is practised. This field consists of the social insurance office, employment agencies, primary health care centres and occupational health service centres. Chapter 5 deals with the regulations and environmental factors influencing the various organizations and their representatives. It points to five external forces that influence the performance of the four type of actors. The social insurance office is influenced by a judicial social insurance logic, the employment agencies by a holistic labour market policy logic, and the physicians in primary health care centres and in occupational health centres by a 'holistic' medical frame of reference, which contrasts with that often found in other medical sub-specialities. Finally, employers are influenced first, by a logic of profit which has a technical and institutional dimension and second, by an institutional welfare state logic. Chapter six shows that the largest 'domain conflict' in the initial phase of the rehabilitation trajectory has to do with defining 'capacity to work'. Domain conflicts are seen as resulting from different institutional logics, implying different views on illness and capacity to work. Numerous and frequent personal interaction make it possible for physicians and rehabilitation officials to avoid conflict. The operative phase is associated with two major domain conflicts. The first is related to negotiations between the social insurance office and the employers about transferring employees to other duties. Both sides avoid exercising power that may damage clients and future trust. Episodic power resources are used to exercise the strategy of 'the golden middle path'. The other domain conflict is related to the judgement of work capacity. The labour market officials' view of work capacity differs from that of the officials at the social insurance office. Chapter seven compares cooperative rehabilitation projects with regular rehabilitation activity. The results show that actors in cooperative projects break the sequential work order used in regular rehabilitation activity and thereby projects quickly collect comprehensive information about individuals. Cooperative projects can also achieve flexible solutions tailored to an individual clients needs. Further, cooperative projects allow time for unconventional initiatives, which regular activity do not. The process of 'returning to work' poses a challenge both kinds of work organizations. Individuals who are disabled in some way are required to meet the same labour market demands as healthy and well educated are expected to meet. Finally, regular rehabilitation work tends uses standardize clients while cooperative projects tend to treat them as individuals. / digitalisering@umu

This dissertation examines the questions: “What are the experiences of Asian women faculty in the Canadian academy?” and “How do they navigate this space?” The study aims to generate new insights into how this understudied and underrepresented population negotiates various aspects of identity, such as gender, race, language and citizenship, as they pursue their academic careers. It provides an original examination of how “Asian” women faculty who have transnational life experience interpret the Canadian academy. Using a qualitative inquiry methodology with a transnational feminist perspective, I conducted in-depth interviews with nine Asian women faculty members in Canadian universities concerning their motivations, desires, contradictions, struggles, and coping strategies within their academic lives. Themes for the analysis arose from the literature, the conceptual framework, my own background and the data. Four major themes organize the analysis: 1) what impact the socially constructed discourse of Canadian citizenry has in the everyday lives of Asian women faculty and how “Asian-woman-ness” operates in the given contexts; 2) what technical difficulties and social barriers emerge from Asian women faculty’s experiences with spoken and written English language; 3) what “cultural logics” Asian women faculty utilize in order to survive/thrive in their social locations as Asian women in the Canadian academy; and 4) how Asian women faculty create their own legitimate space from their marginalized points of view. Through the dual process of their citizenry being de-legitimized in the academy and the nation-state, Asian women faculty strive to become legitimate through creating alternative understandings and definitions of their academic lives. This study was meant to initiate and promote reconfiguration of study on faculty’s lives by foregrounding the transnational feminist framework, which looks at/beyond the institutional, national and temporal borders and at the same time pays close attention to gender and race within the different types of borders. The study suggests that efforts to make higher education more diverse are more complex than some might imagine.

This dissertation examines the questions: “What are the experiences of Asian women faculty in the Canadian academy?” and “How do they navigate this space?” The study aims to generate new insights into how this understudied and underrepresented population negotiates various aspects of identity, such as gender, race, language and citizenship, as they pursue their academic careers. It provides an original examination of how “Asian” women faculty who have transnational life experience interpret the Canadian academy. Using a qualitative inquiry methodology with a transnational feminist perspective, I conducted in-depth interviews with nine Asian women faculty members in Canadian universities concerning their motivations, desires, contradictions, struggles, and coping strategies within their academic lives. Themes for the analysis arose from the literature, the conceptual framework, my own background and the data. Four major themes organize the analysis: 1) what impact the socially constructed discourse of Canadian citizenry has in the everyday lives of Asian women faculty and how “Asian-woman-ness” operates in the given contexts; 2) what technical difficulties and social barriers emerge from Asian women faculty’s experiences with spoken and written English language; 3) what “cultural logics” Asian women faculty utilize in order to survive/thrive in their social locations as Asian women in the Canadian academy; and 4) how Asian women faculty create their own legitimate space from their marginalized points of view. Through the dual process of their citizenry being de-legitimized in the academy and the nation-state, Asian women faculty strive to become legitimate through creating alternative understandings and definitions of their academic lives. This study was meant to initiate and promote reconfiguration of study on faculty’s lives by foregrounding the transnational feminist framework, which looks at/beyond the institutional, national and temporal borders and at the same time pays close attention to gender and race within the different types of borders. The study suggests that efforts to make higher education more diverse are more complex than some might imagine.

Building and mantaining large-scale ontologies is an error-prone task. It is thus not uncommon to find unwanted or unexpected consequences that follow implicitely from the restrictions in the ontology. To understand and correct these consequences, it is helpful to find the specific portions of the ontology that are responsible for them. Axiom-pinpointing is the task of finding minimal subontologies that entail a given consequence, also called MinAs. In this work we look at the task of computing all the MinAs by means of modified decision procedures. We first show that tableaux- and automata-based decision procedures can be transformed into pinpointing algorithms that output a (compact) representation of the set of all MinAs. We then explore the complexity of the problem.

Software start-ups make media headlines daily, suggesting that it may take only a garage and two engineering students to begin such companies, and that these same people will constitute the core of the executive team until these organizations become multinational giants. Despite these spontaneous starts, newly formed entrepreneurial ventures have many obstacles to overcome in their resource and cultural environments when establishing their practices. These obstacles vary depending on the local institutional contexts and can exert relevant pressures on how, where and why start-ups recruit and select certain candidates for their executive teams. Based on interviews conducted in Silicon Valley and Stockholm with 40 key hiring and intermediary actors – entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, board directors, CEOs and executive recruiters - the general aim of this work is that of disclosing step-by-step the process of executive recruitment and selection in start-ups. At the same time, this study seeks to analyze how institutional environments, through the actions of states, governments, universities, professional associations and society in general, shape start-up practices. Finally, the work aims at testing the explanatory power of institutional theories in sociology. The analysis of the interviews shows that different local institutional environments differently and crucially shape organizational actors' interests, roles and patterns of behavior when constructing their practices. Two distinct ideal-typical dominant logics surface among key actors in the two geographical contexts. On one side, Silicon Valley actors recruit and select their executives by using a business logic based on an efficiency rationale. On the other side, Stockholm actors make use of a personal logic based on a rationale of cultural fit when calculating which specific candidate better matches a certain executive position.

The relationship between the state and the people is a central theme in political theory. Discussions in this field have often centered on how a people can come to constitute a state. Less attention, however, has been directed toward the state’s role in constituting and recreating its people. This book examines the Swedish state’s role in forming the people by regulating the use of reproductive techniques: insemination, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and donations of sperm and eggs. The study focuses on how the issue of assisted reproduction was handled and problematized in Swedish policymaking between 1981 and 2005. What problem representations dominated the political debates and decision-making processes surrounding assisted reproduction? How was conflict expressed within the field of reproductive politics (i.e., what aspects caused conflict or political disagreement)? How did collective fantasies play into the political treatment of reproductive technologies? Using historical government and Riksdag material, four major policy debates have been analyzed, from the first legal regulation of assisted reproduction in Sweden in the 1980s up until the inclusion of lesbian couples as beneficiaries of gamete donation. Theoretically, the study is inspired by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s political discourse theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the “logics approach” developed by Jason Glynos and David Howarth. This combination of perspectives allows for a dual focus on both the form of political articulations and their affective force. Thus, the analysis tries to capture what was taken for granted within the discourse on reproduction (social logics), what arose as points of political conflict or contention (political logics), as well as the affective underpinnings of these social constructions and struggles (fantasmatic logics). The main result of the study is that even though the period saw a quite revolutionary development of new reproductive technologies, the reproduction policies under study took on much more moderate and hesitant character. Throughout the analyzed period there was a more or less consensual view that new reproductive technologies should only be allowed if they did not go against the “child’s best interest.” At the same time, there was significant political conflict over what constituted this interest. Moreover, the reforms that were made never fully embraced the radical implications of the new technologies. Rather, they clung on to previously established patterns of what a “real” family looked like. Thus, every move to allow a new technology or include another category of people as legitimate users of that technology was contingent upon the articulation of a discursive equivalence with previously naturalized methods of reproduction, ultimately taking the heterosexual, nuclear family as an implicit model. Finally, I argue that the production of “sense” in this terrain of radical undecidability was dependent on the mobilization of a series of collective fantasies about “natural life processes,” “nature’s imperfections,” “a humanist view of mankind,” “the stable, original nuclear family”, and so on.

Many information sources can be viewed as collections of objects and descriptions about objects. The relationship between objects is often characterized by a set of constraints that semantically encode background knowledge of some domain. The most straightforward and fundamental way to access information in these repositories is to search for objects that satisfy certain selection criteria. This work considers a description logics (DL) based representation of such information sources and object queries, which allows for automated reasoning over the constraints accompanying objects. Formally, a knowledge base K=(T, A) captures constraints in the terminology (a TBox) T, and objects with their descriptions in the assertions (an ABox) A, using some DL dialect L. In such a setting, object descriptions are L-concepts and object identifiers correspond to individual names occurring in K. Correspondingly, object queries are the well known problem of instance retrieval in the underlying DL knowledge base K, which returns the identifiers of qualifying objects. This work generalizes instance retrieval over knowledge bases to provide users with answers in which both identifiers and descriptions of qualifying objects are given. The proposed query paradigm, called assertion retrieval, is favoured over instance retrieval since it provides more informative answers to users. A more compelling reason is related to performance: assertion retrieval enables a transfer of basic relational database techniques, such as caching and query rewriting, in the context of an assertion retrieval algebra. The main contributions of this work are two-fold: one concerns optimizing the fundamental reasoning task that underlies assertion retrieval, namely, instance checking, and the other establishes a query compilation framework based on the assertion retrieval algebra. The former is necessary because an assertion retrieval query can entail a large volume of instance checking requests in the form of K|= a:C, where "a" is an individual name and "C" is a L-concept. This work thus proposes a novel absorption technique, ABox absorption, to improve instance checking. ABox absorption handles knowledge bases that have an expressive underlying dialect L, for instance, that requires disjunctive knowledge. It works particularly well when knowledge bases contain a large number of concrete domain concepts for object descriptions. This work further presents a query compilation framework based on the assertion retrieval algebra to make assertion retrieval more practical. In the framework, a suite of rewriting rules is provided to generate a variety of query plans, with a focus on plans that avoid reasoning w.r.t. the background knowledge bases when sufficient cached results of earlier requests exist. ABox absorption and the query compilation framework have been implemented in a prototypical system, dubbed CARE Assertion Retrieval Engine (CARE). CARE also defines a simple yet effective cost model to search for the best plan generated by query rewriting. Empirical studies of CARE have shown that the proposed techniques in this work make assertion retrieval a practical application over a variety of domains.

Many information sources can be viewed as collections of objects and descriptions about objects. The relationship between objects is often characterized by a set of constraints that semantically encode background knowledge of some domain. The most straightforward and fundamental way to access information in these repositories is to search for objects that satisfy certain selection criteria. This work considers a description logics (DL) based representation of such information sources and object queries, which allows for automated reasoning over the constraints accompanying objects. Formally, a knowledge base K=(T, A) captures constraints in the terminology (a TBox) T, and objects with their descriptions in the assertions (an ABox) A, using some DL dialect L. In such a setting, object descriptions are L-concepts and object identifiers correspond to individual names occurring in K. Correspondingly, object queries are the well known problem of instance retrieval in the underlying DL knowledge base K, which returns the identifiers of qualifying objects. This work generalizes instance retrieval over knowledge bases to provide users with answers in which both identifiers and descriptions of qualifying objects are given. The proposed query paradigm, called assertion retrieval, is favoured over instance retrieval since it provides more informative answers to users. A more compelling reason is related to performance: assertion retrieval enables a transfer of basic relational database techniques, such as caching and query rewriting, in the context of an assertion retrieval algebra. The main contributions of this work are two-fold: one concerns optimizing the fundamental reasoning task that underlies assertion retrieval, namely, instance checking, and the other establishes a query compilation framework based on the assertion retrieval algebra. The former is necessary because an assertion retrieval query can entail a large volume of instance checking requests in the form of K|= a:C, where "a" is an individual name and "C" is a L-concept. This work thus proposes a novel absorption technique, ABox absorption, to improve instance checking. ABox absorption handles knowledge bases that have an expressive underlying dialect L, for instance, that requires disjunctive knowledge. It works particularly well when knowledge bases contain a large number of concrete domain concepts for object descriptions. This work further presents a query compilation framework based on the assertion retrieval algebra to make assertion retrieval more practical. In the framework, a suite of rewriting rules is provided to generate a variety of query plans, with a focus on plans that avoid reasoning w.r.t. the background knowledge bases when sufficient cached results of earlier requests exist. ABox absorption and the query compilation framework have been implemented in a prototypical system, dubbed CARE Assertion Retrieval Engine (CARE). CARE also defines a simple yet effective cost model to search for the best plan generated by query rewriting. Empirical studies of CARE have shown that the proposed techniques in this work make assertion retrieval a practical application over a variety of domains.